Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: an analysis (part 4)

(last part) (thank GOD)

Okay. If you are just now joining us, this is a high-school graduate’s half-assed (pardon my English) attempt at rebutting the nonsense of Judith Butler which, by the way, is a HUGE influence on today’s gender-identity movement. If you have been wondering why that six-foot-five dude in the Party City wig named Porna Diction has been wandering around your locker room with his family jewels swinging in the breeze and no one in authority has done anything to stop him, Butler’s the first person you should thank.

I picked an essay of hers at random to pick apart, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory (that’s a PDF), and… I didn’t mention this before, but come to find out it is THE essay: her foundation of sand upon which she has built her entire kingdom of kookiness. A lot of the silly things you have been hearing or reading on social media about sex and gender got their start with THIS essay. I had no idea. I basically just googled and grabbed. I found out what it was when I looked up her Wikipedia article for a different reason. Oops.

Facebook friends have, upon learning of my quest here, expressed massive sympathy and the hope that I have access to good painkillers. Happily, this post addresses the final section of her essay. And even with that, even with wanting to get done with at least twenty-four hours before the reason I’m doing this would need to use it, if they do, I’ve been putting this post off all day.

But… nothing for it. Gotta finish what I started.

So the final section of this abomination (page twelve in the PDF if you can’t find it) which has stolen, so far, at least six hours of my life that I desperately want back is entitled “III. Feminist Theory: Beyond an Expressive Model of Gender.” And I am pretty sure what this bit is talking about refers back to the previous post where Butler was hotly denying that there was any such thing (or person) as a sexed body who then engages in gendered behaviors, that instead the gendered behaviors just sort of exist and then create a person to perform them. What? Go back and look. It was something like that. Really out there. Typical of the author.

And if I’m right, before we even get into this, I just want to point out that there is absolutely no point to feminism as we understand it if we now have to base it on denying the existence of living female bodies who might or might not act out gender (sexist stereotype). Feminism is the movement to liberate female people from the patriarchy. Take away the female people and what do you have left? Maybe what Butler wants is to base the movement around patriarchal femininity. Meaning, she wants a movement that… does something… to or about… sexist stereotypes about female people that are made up by male people who don’t like us. Something like that.

Let’s see if I’m right.

Okay, first we have to back up to the last few sentences of the previous section, because I got lazy last night and skipped all that crap. This should be enough to get an idea:

Performing one's gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all. That this reassurance is so easily displaced by anxiety, that culture so readily punishes or marginalizes those who fail to perform the illusion of gender essentialism should be sign enough that on some level there is social knowledge that the truth or falsity of gender is only socially compelled and in no sense ontologically necessitated.

Just got into this and already have to look up some big words.

essentialism: The view that objects have a set of attributes that are necessary to their identity.

identity: The distinguishing character or personality of an individual.

ontological: Relating to the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.

And, because you’re tired of going back to part 1 to refresh your memory, here is how I am using three important terms in these posts. I may be phrasing them a bit differently but I’m basically saying the same things:

SEX: female, male (“intersex” people are also either female or male)

SEX CLASS: woman, man (“intersex” people are also either women or men)

GENDER: sexist stereotype, particularly used to maintain men’s domination and women’s subordination

And, again, it is important to keep in mind that most of the time when Judith Butler writes gender or gender identity, what she really means is sex class. We have seen evidence of that in part 1, which you already didn’t want to look at again, but you can go dig it up if you want. There have been a few places where she lapsed and really was talking about gender, but that is not the general rule.

With that in mind, examine the above quotation again. You may have heard the term gender essentialism before. Gender-identity activists love to throw that term around as an accusation against radical feminists when the latter state that women never have penises. This is not a correct usage of the term. In gender essentialism, what we’re doing is claiming that a person has to engage in a specific set of behaviors or look a specific way in order to be a “real” woman or man. But when gender identitarians use the term, they’re saying it’s gender-essentialist to say that you must have been born with certain body parts to be one sex or the other. This is one of many, many examples of terms this movement has stolen from feminism and other movements and then twisted to mean something else entirely.

To make this a bit easier to see, I offer the following illustration:

Not gender essentialism: A woman is an adult human being who was born with ovaries.
Gender essentialism: A woman is a feminine-minded person.
Woke gender essentialism: A feminine-minded person is a woman.

Hope that helps.

Anyway, the above quotation of Butler’s would actually be true if she were actually talking about gender. She’s done this a LOT in this essay and it kind of drives me slightly nuts. But knowing that she normally means sex class when she says the word gender completely blows that out of the water. She’s saying that womanhood and manhood are only illusions society makes us perform and are not real, physical, material states with specific attributes of their own.

Again.

But this is not enough for Butler. Doesn’t go far enough. And so we continue:

This view of gender does not pose as a comprehensive theory about what gender is or the manner of its construction, and neither does it prescribe an explicit feminist political program.

Well, no, no one’s going to suggest a feminist political program for a bunch of figments of our imaginations, Judith. We don’t suggest feminist political programs for the Loch Ness Monster, either.

Indeed, I can imagine this view of gender being used for a number of discrepant political strategies.

You mean like men’s invasion of female spaces and theft of female resources under the banner of transgenderism? That political strategy?

Some of my friends may fault me for this and insist that any theory of gender constitution has political presuppositions and implications, and that it is impossible to separate a theory of gender from a political philosophy of feminism. In fact, I would agree, and argue that it is primarily political interests which create the social phenomena of gender itself, and that without a radical critique of gender constitution feminist theory fails to take stock of the way in which oppression structures the ontological categories through which gender is conceived.

ONCE AGAIN, if Butler were ACTUALLY talking about gender here, of course she’s right: sexist stereotype serves political ends, so political interests are definitely involved in the creation of sexist stereotypes. But Butler is arguing that women and men are just concepts, and that mainly it’s political interests that created these concepts.

And for some reason Butler believes feminists have never come up with a radical critique of gender. What the hell has she been reading? Or listening to? Ever? We’re doing it right now, in fact, and for that she calls us Nazis.

Here we go taking some other writer’s name in vain again:

Gayatri Spivak has argued that feminists need to rely on an operational essentialism, a false ontology of women as a universal in order to advance a feminist political program.

Of course woman is not a universal. There’s a whole entire one other sex class besides us. We’re only half the story. Does Spivak mean a universal woman experience? We all have being human, being adults, and having been born with ovaries in common with one another. We often, but not always, share other experiences. We don’t have to all be exactly alike to “advance a feminist political program.” Unless Spivak — and Butler — are prepared to argue there are no brown or black feminists in the developing world. I dunno. Maybe they are. Butler in particular has proven intractably clueless about feminism thus far in this mess here.

Kristeva suggests something similar, I think, when she prescribes that feminists use the category of women as a political tool without attributing ontological integrity to the term, and adds that, strictly speaking, women cannot be said to exist.

A claim with which, we have seen, Butler wholeheartedly agrees. So what’s the point of feminism, then? How do you use a word as a political tool when you can’t even define it, which is what “attributing ontological integrity” actually means? What are we fighting for, the rights of chairs?

Feminists might well worry about the political implications of claiming that women do not exist, especially in light of the persuasive arguments advanced by Mary Anne Warren in her book, Gendercide. She argues that social policies regarding population control and reproductive technology are designed to limit and, at times, eradicate the existence of women altogether.

HOW THE HELL DO YOU DO THAT WHEN WOMEN DON’T EXIST

In light of such a claim, what good does it do to quarrel about the metaphysical status of the term, and perhaps, for clearly political reasons, feminists ought to silence the quarrel altogether.

Oh, I dunno. Maybe we can’t stop governments from wiping women out if we can’t even agree on who or what the women are, BUTLER. Perhaps, for clearly rational reasons, you ought to silence yourself altogether. You’re not helping.

But it is one thing to use the term and know its ontological insufficiency and quite another to articulate a normative vision for feminist theory which celebrates or emancipates an essence, a nature, or a shared cultural reality which cannot be found.

There is no OnToLoGiCaL iNsUfFiCiEnCy in the term women, Butler. There may be quite a lot of ontological insufficiency in between your ears.

I will readily agree women don’t have one single shared cultural reality and yes, I have seen certain factions of feminism, or at least feminist-aligned whatever, claiming that we do. I also roll my eyes at that claim. But women definitely are a discrete (distinct/separate) group with specific common traits. And Judith Butler shares those traits, regardless of what personal third-person pronouns she prefers for herself.

The next couple paragraphs are Butler picking the rancid boils of her “sex class is nothing but a collection of cultural mores and social acts” nonsense and something Foucault something something something. Yawn.

The next paragraph after she mentions Foucault, I think she comes around to saying that she wants us to get to a point where all the gender markers of behavior and clothing and so on are no longer gendered but actually mean nothing. This crap drives me up a wall. I’ve mentioned already a few times that I think her fundamental problem is she confuses gender and sex class. Here we see it again, if I’m interpreting her correctly. Because OF COURSE it’d be nice if we could ditch the gender uniforms and the expectations of gendered behavior that has nothing to do with sexual reproduction or (especially early) childrearing. But it sounds like what she wants instead is a world in which nobody is either sex because society made it all the hell up anyway. I mean, I could be wrong, but that’s what it sounds like.

Then there’s this.

Certainly, it remains politically important to represent women,

But you said women don’t exist. How do you represent people who don’t exist?

but to do that in a way that does not distort and reify the very collectivity the theory is supposed to emancipate.

You have to represent women, who don’t exist, but you’re not allowed to pretend their imaginary common traits are real. Bigot.

Feminist theory which presupposes sexual difference as the necessary and invariant theoretical point of departure clearly improves upon those humanist discourses which conflate the universal with the masculine and appropriate all of culture as masculine property

Feminist theory which notices that there are two sexes and they’re different is an improvement on political discussions which treat the male as the universal and culture as male culture. Yeah. We can agree on that one.

More in that vein, agreement with feminists (not sure why; she’s not even starting from the same theoretical place — we don’t exist, after all), and then:

My only concern is that sexual difference not become a reification which unwittingly preserves a binary restriction on gender identity and an implicitly heterosexual framework for the description of gender, gender identity, and sexuality.

It’s okay if you are only pretending there is sexual difference and don’t actually believe it’s real because if you believe/pretend it’s real, then people can’t pretend to be other sex classes. Oh and you’re not supposed to notice anymore that most people are straight, either.

There is, in my view, nothing about femaleness that is waiting to be expressed; there is, on the other hand, a good deal about the diverse experiences of women that is being expressed and still needs to be expressed, but caution is needed with respect to that theoretical language, for it does not simply report a pre-linguistic experience, but constructs that experience as well as the limits of its analysis.

What did we discuss about this already in, I think, the previous post? Femaleness is as necessary to womanhood as counting is to algebra. If you take the femaleness out, you don’t have a woman.

I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about from “but caution is needed” onward. I’m just gonna leave that there and move on. I’m tired.

Regardless of the pervasive character of patriarchy and the prevalence of sexual difference as an operative cultural distinction, there is nothing about a binary gender system that is given.

Since you mean sex class, yes, the binary sex class system is beyond given.

If you actually meant gender, the word means “type or category” and it doesn’t matter how many of them there are. No one cares. It’s not relevant, and gender is not equivalent to womanhood or manhood. It’s interesting, too: other than trans woman, trans man, and non-binary, most people do not bother naming all these supposedly other genders. Once in a while you run across a list some bored high-school senior with a free period has made up and posted on Tumblr, but that’s about it and none of us remember any of that crap. If Butler would spend less time trying to prove women don’t exist and more time fleshing out the theory behind gender identity, maybe she could name all those other genders and stop complaining that they are invisible to the larger culture. I dunno.

And her last bit (which is never just a bit… get to the point, Butler):

As a corporeal field of cultural play, gender is a basically innovative affair, although it is quite clear that there are strict punishments for contesting the script by performing out of turn or through unwarranted improvisations. Gender is not passively scripted on the body, and neither is it determined by nature, language, the symbolic, or the overwhelming history of patriarchy. Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure, but if this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or linguistic given, power is relinquished to expand the cultural field bodily through subversive performances of various kinds.

Oh, do we actually mean gender again? I have no idea whether we gendered behaviors and clothing and what-not before we had patriarchy, but patriarchal gender is exactly what we have now and there’s huge interplay between it and language and “the symbolic.” This is Butler not understanding feminism again. Quelle surprise.

I don’t see gender — sexist stereotype — as “cultural play,” either. For women it is an imposition and an obstacle to full liberation. If Butler wants to play in shit (pardon my English), have at it, but I suspect most of the rest of us want better for ourselves.

…

So. In case you skipped all the way down to here in hopes that I would sum up this absolute trainwreck, here you go: Butler’s main problem is that she does not acknowledge the differences between sex, sex class, and gender (or gender identity), and I’m not clear whether that’s deliberate. Most of the time when she speaks of gender (sexist stereotype) she means sex class (women and men). But sometimes she lapses over into meaning gender when she speaks of gender. It makes it very difficult to determine exactly what she’s after, and then she makes everything worse by using confusing language. I suspect most people who claim to agree with her are only doing it to make themselves look intelligent and not because they actually understand what she’s saying. I didn’t understand everything she was saying, and I run intellectual circles around most of the people supporting this stuff. I’m not saying that to be full of myself. It’s true. You can tell by the way they speak and use language. They’re just parroting what they hear. They don’t actually understand it.

These people are influencing your leaders. Stupid parroty unoriginal anti-science people are influencing your government. This is why your kids are getting poisoned and cut up and turned against you. You like it?

Me neither.

I haven’t decided whether I will go pick apart other Butler things. If I do, I might go into interviews with her and have fun with those. At least she’ll be forced to use normal language for once.

If this takedown series has helped anyone out there, I’m glad. If I didn’t make any more sense than she did, I apologize. If you think you can do better, you could be right. Go start a Substack and try it yourself. The more of us who speak out against Butler’s blatant madness, the better. People’s lives are being ruined by this theoretical trash every day. J.K. Rowling can’t save all of us. Time to tote the load.